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Sunday, May 12, 2013

A Sunday Ride to the Beach (Peacock Included)

My mountain bike won't be used again until we tour.

I'll be honest. I'm not a fan of the beach. We get enough sun time while we're out on the bikes.

But Miami is the first place we've lived where the beach is a possible bike ride destination. You can ride there, have a snack or a picnic, then ride home. We have a wide selection of beaches, too. Today we picked Crandon Park out the Rickenbacker on Key Biscayne. At 880 acres, Crandon is a fair size city park, and the park is mostly one very long beach. The nice part for us is that Crandon lets us do our regular daily ride to the Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park lighthouse, wander around Key Biscayne, then take the Key Biscayne bike path into Crandon.

Today we had an obstacle on the bike path that was a first for us. A peacock. He owned his spot on the path, and he had no intention of moving. Joggers and other bikers wove around him. I decided I wanted to see what he would do if I just very, very slowly edged toward him on the bike. OK, what this bird did was squawk, turn his back to me, and do the tail display thing. Move? No. Now that is a peacock with attitude.

It's his spot on the path, and he's not going to move.

He didn't move when we got right next to him, he just showed tail and attitude.

This is our last ride on the mountain bikes for a couple of weeks. Al has been eager to start regular club rides with an Everglades Bicycle Club group. We're thinking of one of the Saturday morning rides beginning next Saturday. We haven't done club rides in a decade. We'll be on our road bikes, of course. Some people can move back and forth between their bikes at will. Me? I need a day or two to adjust. Each bike uses the body a bit differently, and I need a ride or two to get comfy.

Al spent the late morning doing maintenance on the road bikes. I reattached the gear bags. Tomorrow I'll give the mountain bikes a good wash. We'll break them out again in a few weeks when we take our first short tour.

Postscript: We diverted our routes on our next two rides to check out a hunch about the bike lane peacock. Sure enough, on both subsequent rides, the same peacock was in the same spot with the same attitude. We even did a quick run-by of several of the other peacocks to check if, perhaps, it was another of the peacocks. Nope, it was the same one, a funny feather in the tail was a dead give away.I love this bird!